The Dictionary of Human Geography

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moment of epistemic formation coincident

with the onset of what he calls the Classical

Age (1600–1800). Before the end of the

sixteenth century, an age characterized by

a theory of ‘resemblances’ or ‘similitudes’,

Foucault argues, images and words were

understood as decipherable hieroglyphs, as so

many figural or iconic ‘signatures’ that bore

intrinsic affinities to the things of a divinely

ordained world. The result was an essential

seamlessness, a ‘non-distinction between what

is seen and what is read. .. the constitution of

a single, unbroken surface in which observa-

tion and language intersect to infinity’

(Foucault, 1977). For reasons that Foucault

unfortunately fails to explicate, the Classical

Age emerges when this unity is shattered by a

growing awareness of the binary nature of

representation; that is, of the discriminatory

judgement of identity and difference, of the

placing of things in differential relation to each

other as the means to describe and systematize

the manifold objects of the external world.

Knowledge now begins to occupy a new space.

It is the spacewithin representation itself,

inside the tools of its language, classificatory

systems, and modes of naming and viewing.

Natural history and concomitant taxonomic

or tabular orderings of the world owe their

triumph precisely to representation so under-

stood. Importantly, the only thing that is not,

and cannot, be included within this represen-

tational frame is the act of representation

itself. Indeed, it is only in the absence of the

viewing, naming and describing subject, that

representation can claim its authority as infal-

lible knowledge.

With this analysis, and Foucault’s subse-

quent charting of the shift from a Classical

to a Modern episteme, in which language

becomes opaque as Man is arranged at the

centre of knowledge, the stage is set for under-

standing representation as a discursive prac-

tice, as a kind of work (see discourse).

Alternatively known as the social constructiv-

ist approach (seesocial construction), this

perspective recognizes that while concepts and

signs may have some material dimension (we

do, after all, emit sounds when we speak, paint

marks on a canvas, transmit electronic

impulses when taking a digital photograph),

the meaning of such things depends not on

any pragmatic quality but on their symbolic

and social function. It is for this reason that

Ferdinand de Saussure (1966) preferred the

word ‘signify’ rather than ‘represent’ for what

words and concepts do: they do not describe a

pre-existent reality, but constitute what counts

and is valued as reality. Influenced by

Saussarian linguistics and rehearsed within

various registers ofpost-structuralism, the

constructedness of representation is now a

chief interpretive principle cutting across a

wide sampling of contemporary theories,

including those of human geography. Indeed,

one can say that ‘geo-graphy’, in its etymo-

logical connection to ‘earth-writing’, holds

the idea of ‘representation-as-text’ at its prac-

tical and theoretical root (Cosgrove and

Daniels, 1988; Barnes and Duncan, 1992;

Duncan and Ley, 1993; Gregory, 1994).

However, acknowledging the constructed

nature of representation is one thing; investi-

gating the inherent partiality and limitations

in anything constructed is another. Alongside

questions ofwhoandwhatit is that ‘repre-

sents’ (i.e. what enunciative, rhetorical or

institutional position is involved in the act of

representing) attention also has to be paid to

the restrictions of the representational model:

to not only what it excludes, but also what it

inhibits in accessing the perceptual practices

of our sensory and somatic lives. In recent

human geography, the disappearance of the

textual dimension in so-called ‘non-represen-

tational theory’ offers one such address.

Concerned to close the distance between sub-

ject and object – the very distance implied by

representation as mediation, illustration or

derivative sign-language – non-representa-

tional theory attends to how certainspaces,

experiences and states act directly on the

body, addressing the manifoldaffects, sensa-

tions and, indeed, visibilities of the world

in the subject’s felt engagement with it. Here

thereof representation, or the substitutive

value that thisreindicates, makes way for a

certain intensification of presentation, for an

immediacy of presence of which any second-

ary reproduction of the world can give no

account (Dewsbury, Wylie, Harrison and

Rose, 2002). jd

Suggested reading

Elkins (2002); Evans and Hall (1998); Jay

(1993); Mirzoeff (1999).

resistance Inhuman geography, resistance

has two distinctive meanings: political resist-

ance, the more common usage, refers to resist-

ance to domination or oppression; psychic

resistance refers to unconscious attempts to

maintain repressions of traumatic or danger-

ous memories (seepsychoanalytic theory).

Pile and Keith (1997) discuss how the two

concepts work in relation to each other.

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_R-new Final Proof page 646 2.4.2009 9:12pm

RESISTANCE